IN THE END, it was Marty Morrissey.
As RTÉ made public various items of expenditure (hereafter referred to as jollies) and gaps in their commercial deal oversight this week, it came to light that a certain staff member had the use of a Renault car for five years before returning it shortly before this week’s Oireachtas Media Committee.
Heartbreakingly, GAA presenter and commentator Morrissey revealed the Renault bandit was none other than he. It was a bitter pill to swallow, amid a rake of many other bemusing and confusing pills. Rubbery, flip-flop textured pills.
It should tell us quite a lot that Senator Timmy Dooley, who raised the question in a Columbo-style ‘one more thing’ gambit before the session’s comfort break, has since gone out of his way to clarify that he did not have Morrissey in mind when asking the question.
“The reality is that the questions I asked clearly didn’t even relate to Marty Morrissey’s case,” Dooley said on Morning Ireland, pointing out that Marty dropped the car back the week previous and that his other questions related to a person who didn’t have a licence, which is not the case for Morrissey.
“For some reason RTÉ management decided to create this notion about an individual who had a car loan, creating a level of hype.”
RTÉ management can be blamed for a lot, but neither Dooley nor any of the Oireachtas members can say they have not leaned fulsomely into the hype created by the secret payment scandal.
A thorough examination of RTÉ’s many jollies means that we might learn things we don’t like about even the most popular presenters. Read into this what you will, but it seems as though there is less outrage directed at Morrissey than had the car been on loan to, say, Ryan Tubridy or an executive board member.
This is not particularly hard to explain. A five-year unauthorised car loan for a well-loved media personality who has been a consistent performer for 30 years may be indicative of a culture of poor corporate governance, but it doesn’t hold much weight against €5,000 spent on 200 pairs of flip-flops, renewing a costly membership at an exclusive London club in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, or €2.2 million lost on a musical that mystified the public from the word go.
€8,000 per annum is now being spent on storing the set of Toy Show The Musical. According to RTÉ Director of Strategy Rory Coveney (yes, Simon’s brother), this is until they “figure out what to do with it”. A man with a plan.
In the context of IRFU season tickets, trips to Japan, and whatever you’re having yourself, Morrissey’s offence is down the lower end of the jolly scale. It is impossible to ignore, however, that favourable deals for “top talent” have been endemic at RTÉ at a time when ordinary workers at the broadcaster have been put to the pin of their collar.
A wage bill of over €15 million for 100 employees out of an overall staff of around 1,800 is painful reading for some, and each fresh revelation seems to suggest it’s jollies all the way down.
This was the moment Senator Timmy Dooley pulled a Columbo to ask when a car on loan for five years to an RTÉ employee was returned. pic.twitter.com/yxp6O3ZQ3i
— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) July 5, 2023
And yet, despite their best efforts, RTÉ do not currently have a monopoly on crazy purchases made by major Irish media organisations.
The week had been trucking along as expected: more Oireachtas humiliation, the promise of a Tubridy marathon next week, the Marty Morrissey mystery… And then Newstalk bought a gun.
In an experiment designed to demonstrate Meta’s lack of oversight over their Facebook Marketplace, Newstalk journalist Jess Kelly used the platform to buy a gun, a real life gun, that arrived to Marconi House in a plastic bag.
Kelly and Newstalk promptly called the guards to notify them that the .22 calibre was in their possession, and the Gardaí took it away to examine it, before any of their presenters had the chance to open their shows by firing a few rounds into the ceiling.
The secondary takeaway from this exercise appears to be that Newstalk are prepared to procure a gun at any time. Do we applaud? Do we cower? Does a gun count as a jolly?
I have asked, by the way, and The Journal will not let me have a gun. They told me it would be “bad for morale” and that I’m “on thin ice as it is”.
Evidently, they are not taking seriously enough this panel of AI humanoid monsters that addressed the UN on Friday to tell us all they can run the world better than we can. When those robots start writing columns you better believe I’ll be defending myself by any means necessary.
In more heartening news, Friday saw a demonstration of hundreds in Cork, gathered in solidarity with library workers who face harassment from far-right groups.
Throughout the year, library staff have faced disruption from agitators seeking to remove books from the library listings, and the show of support organised by Fórsa for library workers was a rare moment of hope in a week marked by scammers, RTÉ disclosures, and Newstalk buying a gun.
For now, we look ahead to next Tuesday’s Tubridy marathon where the man at the centre of the secret payment scandal will appear before two Oireachtas Committees for a total of six hours alongside his pinstripey agent Noel Kelly.
RTÉ could do worse than taking the Toy Show set out of storage and putting together a musical based on the events of the last few weeks. I will personally take charge of it, and I am prepared to guarantee it will lose at least marginally less than €2.2 million.
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